Amoking About in Cambodia

Mangostin Fruit, you eat the white in the middle!

After an intense day in Pehnom Penh and success with our Vietnamese visa's we met up to find a recommended restaurant to try Cambodia's national dish of Amok.  I had heard of amok many times but every opportunity I had to order it I always found something I was craving more.  With a name like fish amok it never sounded very appetizing.

Amok is a dish with different vegetables like green beans, carrots, pumpkin some sort of green leaf and usually fish or chicken in a yellow curry sauce.  Usually the dish is served over rice and it soupy. Berg and I found the restaurant we were looking for and ordered some amok and some mango spicy salad.

The chicken amok we received was different than I had imagined.  It was not soupy there was no rice and it was more like a pastry.  Apparently they make it two ways.  This one was a bit similar to a quiche with the crust and in the middle was the curry and chicken and vegetables.  To my surprise the dish was very tasty and I enjoyed it so much so that for the next two nights I ordered amok at 2 other restaurants in to other towns to compare.

First I headed back for Battambang where I was going to catch the river boat to Siem Reap.  I went out to a local restaurant and ordered the amok here.  This one was more traditional and soupy and delicious.  The next night in Siem Reap I ordered the same again at another local restaurant.  This time I ordered the fish amok.  I assumed it would be shredded or very small pieces of fish and possibly too fishy for my taste but the amok came out with nice chunky pieces of fillet filled with loads of vegetables including pumpkin.  This third time was by far my favorite of the three and it tasted incredible.

The food of Cambodia appears very similar to me to those found in Thailand.  Thai food is very fragrant with many different flavors of lemongrass, Thai basil and curry.  So far all the food I have had everywhere has been delicious like pad Thais, green curry, yellow curry, red curry, cashew chicken, basil chicken, pork, mango salad, tom yum soup etc etc.  I am loving the food but often find that it's always a stir fry with rice or noodles or a soup or curry.  I have also been disappointed in the spice of the Thais.  Everyone claims Thai food is spicy but even when you ask them to make is Thai spicy it usually falls short of my expectations and without fail I always add more chili. 

I have also fallen in love with the fruits here.  Every morning I have fresh fruit with muesli and usually a homemade yogurt.  I have tried many new fruits and am always amazed by the variety and flavors.  Everywhere here you can get giant fresh fruit smoothies with the freshest most delicious fruits.  The mango, watermelon and bananas here are so much more flavorful than back home and it is something I will miss a lot once I leave.  Next cuisine to try is the north Thai noodles and then the food in Laos!

Phenom Pehn and the Khmer Rouge

Cambodia's capital Phenom Pehn was busy and crazy with bicycles and motorcycles, tuk tuks, cars, trucks and any other transportation you can imagine with their knack for transporting people and goods.  The traffic on the roads in Phenom Pehn appears to be complete chaos but once you join in it your realized there is an organization to their madness.  I came to Phenom Pehn to get my Vietnamese visa, see the S-21 museum and the killing fields.  All of this I accomplished in a day and two nights minus the killing fields.

My path crossed again with Berg my fellow traveler from China who I met in Bangkok weeks before.  His plan was a mirror image of mine so we decided to execute it together.  We met up for dinner the first night and I had my first taste of pizza in months and months, oh how I have missed western food.  The next morning we agreed to rent bikes, ride to the embassy, then to the museum and the killing fields. 

With the embassy quick and easy we set off for the S-21 Museum.  The museum is the sight of an old school that the Khmer Rouge took over and converted into a prison where they kept people and tortured them.  The school has changed little since 30 years ago and is very powerful in all of it's rawness.  The experience in the museum was so intense and sad I did not take any photo's of the gruesomeness that went on here.  At the school there were multiple different buildings where they imprisoned men, women and children.  To this day the people and the government do not understand Pol Pot and what he was trying to do or accomplish through this horrific genocide. 

We hired a guide who was 10 when forced with her family was evacuated from Phenom Pehn.  Depending on your location the day the Khmer Rouge came into the city the forced everybody to leave, whole families where forced apart and in different directions, so if you were in the north they pushed you north, south...they pushed you south. Kids were left separated from their parents, wives were separated from their husbands and the city was in complete chaos with not a person understanding what was happening.  

The only goal of the KR was to kill people, with a focus on the men.  No one at the time even knew who Pol Pot was as no one had television or food.  Everyone was forced into labor camps and denied basic human rights.  At the prison we visited they chained, tortured and kills thousands and thousands of people.  The victims pictures hang in the museum, some with pin tags stuck in their necks with their bed numbers on them. 

As the Vietnamese came into the city to free them, there were only 7 remaining survivors all of which held skills valuable to the regime.  Right before they arrived they killed the 14 other high ranking KR prisons.  They killed them after torture usually by slitting their throats.  You can visit each of the cells the prisoners were found in and there hangs photos of their dead bodies.

After seeing the atrocities committed by Pol Pot for no reason both Berg and myself realized that we did not need to visit the killing fields where there are over 100 mass graves of the people they killed mostly by bludgeoning them to death.  Some of the graves have been dug up but many remain. I have been told you can still see the bones and clothes of the people in the field.  

For the rest of the day Berg and I took it easy.  We got some food, visited the different markets and felt we had enough cultural history for the day, week, or even month.

Battambang, Is this it????

Battambang is an odd little town with French Colonial architecture not many travelers and not much to do. The town shuts down early at night and the only sights are the bamboo train, a couple temples and the eerie killing caves. On the bus to Battambang I met a German girl traveling alone and we decided to hire a tuk tuk for the next day to see all the Battambang had to offer. That night we headed to the night market for cheap food at one of the stalls. Here we stumbled upon an English speaking Cambodian who ran a stall with his family. He was in his late 40's or 50's and he talked with us shortly about the Khmer Rouge and how he remembered being so hungry. He also introduced us to his family and told us jokes still maintaining a good sense of humor.

"Why do poor Cambodians have so many children.".......Believe me, I used sociology and science to guess about birth and death rates, help in the fields etc etc.  The answer, " because poor people have bad beds and can't sleep, the richer people have comfortable beds and money for booze so they pass our quickly."  Nice Cambodian joke.

The next morning we set out first to the killing caves which were used by the Khmer Rouge as a killing ground.  The caves go deep into the ground and they used to push people to their deaths.  We hiked a little way down but the caves were dark, steep, craggy and dangerous.  They were also unsettling and a bit creepy.  Coming up you can still see a pile of bones and clothes that they left behind from the horribleness that existed here.

Before we headed up the mountain to the caves we were asked many times if we needed a guide but we knew it was easy to locate ourselves and we went up alone.  On our way we acquired an attachment.  A young Cambodian guy decided to tag along with us guiding us about.  At first I was skeptical of his intentions and was only partly listening because I knew by the end he would want money for his unwanted service.  As he asked questions I reluctantly answered them.  Once he discovered my English teaching he began to ask me questions about English.  I slowly began to help my first Cambodian pupil with grammar and pronunciation.  He thanked me continually for being easy to understand and helpful with pronunciation.  As he described the caves and temple for us I corrected his grammar and pronunciation and offered answers to the many questions he asked.  After our tour he left us right where he found us, he said he was repairing the road and needed to get back to work.  We thanked him and he thanked us and it was a great experience.

After we headed to another temple where the children followed us up over 300 stairs waving fans at us until the top.  At the top there was a beautiful but small temple with lots of flowers and land mine warnings all around.  The kids were silly and we took many pictures as they thanked us, they picked flowers but them in our hair and jewelery and continually fanned us.  We sat and rested and chatted with them for a bit.  It was relaxing but I knew they were going to ask for money, which unfortunately they did.  I apologetically said no and we were on our way to our final destination, the bamboo train.

The bamboo train is a jerry-rigged double set of wheels placed on the train tracks with a bamboo platform on top and a motor used to run it forward.  It is used by locals to transport goods to the towns along the tracks.  The freedom of sitting on top and exhilarating through the beautiful scenery was relaxing and enjoyable, except when there was oncoming traffic.  With approaching bamboo trains the train with fewer people needs to get up and the two trains controllers pick up the one train in pieces remove it from the tracks and after the train passes they put it back together.

I enjoyed the day out and the company of my new friend but she was moving on to Thailand and I was headed to Phenom Penh so the next morning we both caught a bus in the opposite directions.  Off to the capital I went.

Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/linseypaddock/Battambang?authkey=Gv1sRgCP7mzZWqsIa7sQE&feat=directlink